LXD is a solution for managing virtual machines and system containers.
It provides a secure and scalable environment with minimal overhead. Manage your workloads with ease and configure them to suit your use case via a user-friendly web interface.
LXD allows you to easily set up a system that feels like a small private cloud. You can run any type of workload in an efficient way while keeping your resources optimized.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Run any type of workload – provides both KVM-based VMs and system containers based on LXC – that can run a full Linux OS – in a single open source virtualisation platform. LXD has numerous built-in management features, including live migration, snapshots, resource restrictions, projects and profiles, and governs the interaction with various storage and networking options.
- Cloud-like experience – image based and supports images for a large number of Linux distributions, as well as Windows VMs. It comes with built-in image stores which enable you to spin up a container or a VM in a matter of seconds. Existing integrations with various deployment and orchestration tools allow you to manage your infrastructure in a cloud-like way. When combined with software-defined storage and networking, LXD becomes a lightweight cloud solution MicroCloud.
- Secure and scalable – runs unprivileged containers by default — protecting the host system from potential attacks. For virtual machines, LXD uses modern virtual hardware (VirtIO) exclusively. In addition, it utilises UEFI SecureBoot and provides vTPM support. Resource restrictions through cgroups and ulimits, as well as fine-grained access control, are also supported. LXD is also easy to scale — from containers on your laptop to thousands of instances in the data centre.
- Flexible resource limits (CPU, memory, network I/O, disk space, and some kernel resources).
- Advanced snapshot support, including scheduling and automatic expiry.
- Projects for segmenting your LXD server, and easy multi-user setup for enhanced security.
- Hardware passthrough (GPU, USB, NIC, disks, and more).
- Support for live-migration and stateful snapshotting.
- Advanced networking support (OVN, SR-IOV, hardware acceleration support).
- High availability clustering when combined with CEPH and OVN for storage and network redundancy.
Website: canonical.com/lxd
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Canonical
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
LXD is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Container Managers | |
|---|---|
| Portainer | Lightweight and easy to use management UI |
| Podman | Tool for managing OCI containers and pods |
| LXD | Manage virtual machines and containers |
| Rancher | Container management platform |
| Mesos | Cluster manager |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Cloudmin | Manage virtual systems running virtualization technology |
| Incus | Modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Pods | Manage your Podman containers |
| Cruise | Docker TUI client |
| Stakkr | Docker recompose tool |
| rkt | Application container engine |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |